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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (202517)	9/11/2006 3:52:44 AM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 281500

This is in response to my saying that I was in favor of getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan. By admitting that I was in favor of our efforts in Afghanistan I don't mean to imply that the war there is now "winnable". It looks to me that we're going to get kicked out. Some of that has to be some blowback from Iraq, but I also think we should have pulled out as quickly as possible. So you advocated the US getting involved in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, right? The groups you call "Islamic-Fascists" are going to take over, isn't it obvious? Hell, the group who referred to themselves as Nazis would have taken over had we all adopted your defeatist isolationism as national policy. So do you think that the "Islamic-Fascists" camels will invade Mexico and then come in over our southern border? Or do you think they'll conquer Europe, and then switch their camels for reindeer and sneak in on Christmas Eve when we won't notice? Carl.. Where have you BEEN?? they are ALREADY coming across our borders!! It's been long know that Islamist cells are infiltrating our border with Mexico. We know that Hugo Chavez has been working with various Islamist groups to train Jihadist operatives to speak passable spanish so they can cross our southern border. We know that the Lebanese Arab community in Paraguay/Uruguay/Bolivia are neck-deep in financing/supporting terrorist activities. worldnetdaily.com findarticles.com jihadwatch.org jihadwatch.org And one thing you overlook is that they don't have to "invade" us with an army.. That's not how they fight and you know that. But when they start blowing up our shopping malls, sniping at our children as they go to schools, and blowing themselves up in "martyrdom attacks" in movie theaters, it will be them bringing war to our country in a way we haven't experienced since the war of 1812. And Al Qai'da and that "weak" Islamo-Fascists managed to do somethat that not even Japan or Hitler was able to achieve. They were able to target an city on the North American continent and conduct a successful attack that just narrowly avoided killing 25,000 people. Hawk

To: Bilow who wrote (202517)	9/17/2006 6:30:13 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush's Iraq rationalization is lame _____________________________________________________________ BY HELEN THOMAS COLUMNIST HEARST NEWSPAPERS Friday, September 15, 2006 WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is relying on a slender thread to justify its disastrous war in Iraq: Saddam Hussein is now in jail. "The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power," President Bush insists, because "he was a clear threat." Bush's rationalization comes up lame, given the administration's reluctant and deferred acknowledgement that Saddam had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and especially in view of the mounting casualty tolls of U.S. service members and Iraqi civilians. Vice President Dick Cheney also says, "The world is better off today with Saddam Hussein out of power." While holding no brief for Iraq's brutal dictator, I question whether we now live in a safer world. The world would be better off without any dictators, of course. That's a given. But I'm thinking of all the Americans and Iraqis who would be alive today had there not been a U.S.-waged war of choice. Anti-terrorism experts regard the U.S. invasion and occupation as an alluring recruiting poster that is attracting more Islamic radicals to the ranks of suicide bombers in Iraq and elsewhere. That may explain the insistence by Bush and Cheney that Iraq is the central front in the fight against terrorism. If it wasn't before the invasion, it is now. The Middle East is aflame and the U.S. has lost its campaign for the hearts and minds of the people in the region. Karen Hughes, the president's close confidante who is in charge of the State Department's public diplomacy, has been given the impossible mission of making friends for the U.S. in the Middle East. She will fail in this mission unless U.S. foreign policy is transformed. Looking back, we had Saddam wrapped up tighter than a detainee in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We had covered Saddam with strangling economic sanctions; regular bombings in the two no-fly zones had kept his military confined since the end of the first Gulf war in 1991; and intense U.S. satellite surveillance of Iraq kept tabs on what was going on. U.N. inspectors and two U.S. task forces spent months and millions of dollars searching Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction -- the centerpiece of Bush's rationale for going to war -- but found nothing. Reminded of this inconvenient truth during his appearance on NBC-TV's "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Cheney had to fall back on the pathetic excuse that, even though Saddam didn't have such weapons, Iraq had the capability of obtaining them. Against that yardstick, most of the world is a potential target for invasion and occupation. The never-give-an-inch vice president concluded: The invasion was "the right thing to do" and "if we had it to do all over again, we'd do exactly the same thing." That statement is outrageous, given the reality that none of the stated reasons for the U.S. invasion turned out to be accurate. Meanwhile, White House press secretary Tony Snow is trying to brush aside the administration's tragic errors by saying, in effect, that the president wants to let bygones be bygones. Snow told reporters last Friday that the president's view is, "OK, we'll let people quibble over (what happened) three years ago, the important thing is to figure out what you're doing tomorrow and the day after and the months after and the years after to make sure this war on terror is won." Clearly, the president has no regrets about the Iraqi debacle as evidenced by the administration's fumbling efforts to fix the facts around his war policy and to fall back on contrived explanations for this tragedy. This isn't the accountability we should expect from any White House, especially when it comes to the power to wage war. *Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2006 Hearst Newspapers. seattlepi.nwsource.com